What to do When You’re Stuck in a Rut

There are those moments in your life when no matter how much effort you put in, the results just don’t pan out. Everything that you do ends up as a failure. However, it is in these moments that we learn an important lesson in life: Sometimes you need to ask for help.

Sounds like a cliché, right? It’s amazing how stubborn people can be in those moments when they’re in need of help. They keep saying to themselves that they can figure it out. There are people who want to do things their way, even when they know that they’re not getting anywhere with the work they’re putting in; there is always a state of denial.

After you get past the state of denial and accept that you need help, the next phase is to figure out what you need help with. What keeps you from progressing? And who can help you? When you figure these things out, you can finally reach out to others and ask for help.

Asking for help is easy; the hard part is accepting the help. Even after knowing that you need help, it’s hard to accept other people’s advice. You will always have excuses, feel you know more than the person helping you, or rationalize that you don’t need help at all. You need to remember that if you continue in this cycle of denial and justification, you will remain stuck.

At first, you might not like what you hear, but somewhere down the line you’ll realize that the things you didn’t want to hear were exactly what you needed to hear. When you ask for help from others, you just need to listen and take everything in perspective. They are not criticizing the way you did things; they are just giving you their knowledge on how you can do better and achieve the results you want. Eventually you’ll look back and see: A helping hand is exactly what we need when we’re stuck in a rut.

Alan is the creator of Interview Success Formula, a training program that has helped more than 40,000 job seekers to ace their interviews and land the jobs they deserve. Interviewers love asking curveball questions to weed out job seekers. But the truth is, most of these questions are asking about a few key areas. Learn more about how to outsmart tough interviewers by watching this video.